There's certainly now a lot to consider when making your next upgrade or purchase for a smart phone. To simplify things for the purposes of this article, we'll just be looking at our top 3 picks for the best smartphone camera for digital photography and recording videos.
Sony Xperia T
Sony have been renowned for producing phones more suited towards music storage and playback in days gone by. But, they have more recently entered the arena for producing mobile phones with impressive cameras.The Xperia range has become synonymous for providing quality cameras on smart phones at affordable prices. At 13MP the Sony Xperia T builds upon Sony's established reputation producing very impressive digital photographic and video results.
The Xperia T features Sony's BSI sensor and an f/2.4 aperture. Indeed, the Xperia T is very capable of producing outstanding end results even in low light lighting and night conditions, especially using the macro setting.
The tap to focus option enables the user to easily switch to close up from landscapes, and also has a great dynamic range. The dynamic range for video shooting is better than the Samsung Galaxy SIII and Note 2. Great video footage can be achieved at full 1080p with 30fps, and whilst it has a slight problems saturated colors we can't really fault the Xperia T for photos and video recording.
Samsung Galaxy SIII
Samsung opted to keep the same number of Megapixels as the SII, which isn't really a problem as we all know a higher resolution doesn't always translate into better quality pictures and to be honest an 8MP on a smartphone is more than adequate. There are ample settings to play around on the SIII including single shot, burst shot, HDR (which the Xperia T lacks), panaroma plus more modes to use.It's very easy to launch into the camera mode and we like the fact that Samsung has culled the number of silly settings to mess around with on the SIII. Samsung have also introduced face detection, which makes it simpler to find your contacts and tag your Friends on Facebook, however it's a bit hit and mess and doesn't always recognize the faces. We don't think the Galaxy SIII is going to win any camera awards for smartphones, but it does a reasonable job and is a reasonable improvement from the SII.
iPhone 5
Recently people have found a significant fault with the iPhone 5 camera, and several leading websites such as Petaxpixel have reported purple lens flare. Apple are claiming it's a non-issue and have issued advice for avoiding the purple lens flare when taking pictures.Given the iPhone 4S doesn't have this problem, it's unfortunate that Apple made the changes to cause this problem to occur. Aside from this purple lens problem inherent with the iPhone 5, the camera is actually quite impressive.
The camera's sensor is a 1/3.2 inch sensor that is much smaller than you'll find in any compact camera. Nevertheless, the image quality in good light conditions are just as good as any compact, but it soon fails in low light conditions and with no simple manual controls to offset this, this is something that will frustrate users taking pictures in say nightclubs, gig venues etc.
There's also let downs when it comes to the lack of image stabilization features, its panoramic mode being temprimental at best, quality greatly impacted at high ISO settings and lack of optical zoom make the iPhone 5 a decent camera and equaling a compact but only in good lighting conditions.
The Nokia 808 is by far the best camera smartphone for producing very high quality pictures and boasting an amazing 41MP sensor integrating Nokia's PureView technology.
Looking at the quality of pictures, they equal that of a DSLR camera, but unfortunately for Nokia this model hasn't sold well and many are more excited by the release of the Nokia Lumia 920 later this year.
Guest ArticleAbout the Guest Author:
Guest article by Dragonfly - a corporate video company in London.